You cannot blame the Sahara alone for the troubles. But you should also not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst. – William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert

Desert rains are usually so definitely demarked that the story of the man who washed his hands in the edge of an Arizona thunder shower without wetting his cuffs seems almost credible. – Administration in the State of Arizona, U.S. public relief program, 1935-1943

Welcome to Arizona, where summer spends the winter — and hell spends the summer. – Popular saying, modified from a booster slogan in the 1930s

The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth. – Donald Culross Peattie, The Road of a Naturalist, 1941